striking as his yoking swift-footed steeds to his chariot. Poseidon Hippios, the Neptune of Horses, was not for the Athenian mind a strange or incongruous combination. The presence of a shrine of the fire-bearer, the Titan Prometheus,[1] probably indicates that the men of the deme were iron-workers, or brass-founders as well. But above all, at Colonos there was the sacred grove of the Eumenides,[2] where the common foot might never tread, the maze with its many paths, the low stone wall which served at once as a boundary and a defence, the descent into sepulchral darkness, of which it was believed that it led down into Hades itself, the shadow-world of the departed.[3] There by the basin in the rock, and the hollow pear-tree, was the record of the friendship of Peirithöos and the great Attic hero Theseus, who had themselves descended to that shadow-world.[4] There the Erinnyes, the stern avenging ones, daughters of darkness, dogging the footsteps of the doer of evil, were thought of as with a new character, under a new name. They were the Gentle Ones, the Eumenides,[5] who might be approached with solemn rites of penitence and purification, and who would then be found placable and
- ↑ Œd. Col., 56. So in Fragm. 724 we may perhaps trace another local allusion: "Working men" (χειρώναξ λεῶς) are called on to worship Athena as the "working Goddess" (Ἐργάνη.)
- ↑ The church dedicated to the Ἅγιοι ἀκίνδυνοι, the ruins of which are still seen at Colonos, gives in its name a faint echo of the old associations. The vines, olives, and nightingales have not passed away.
- ↑ Œd. Col., 16, 1590–1596.
- ↑ Ibid., 593.
- ↑ Ibid., 40–42.
